Now... I really don't believe this will take us anywhere but I would be very happy to see something going forward with this.
All I want is my money back and move forward. I even paid $40 extra for shipping overseas...

Those unscrupulous morons are just living a high life thanks to our hard earned money... I hope karma will take care of all of you. Then, I will also send you an email saying "I am sorry".

Pretty much +1 what everyone else said but just so the comment count reflects the strength of public opinion. Is investing in new tech risky? Sure is. Did these guys go about it the right way? Sure didn't. I'm sure if they went after real VC they would have failed the vetting process - so instead they got $$ from us amateurs who wanted to see a cool concept come to life. Along with many others, I pretty much knew this was coming. I'm surprised they held out as long as they did but I was not at all surprised by the announcement. I AM surprised they even bothered to post that apology - what is is worth to any of us?

Superbacker

I saw this coming when these idiots were obviously more concerned on showing off this non-existing product and flying around with my and all the backers money to all these shows trying to scam more people.
Lessons learned: if it's too good to be true, run away. I will never back a project with more than $15 unless Kickstarter finds a way to combat this kind of mismanagement and scammy behaviour.
Please accept me in the facebook group @ https://www.facebook.com/groups/932229213618373/

Open source all the design spec in hardware, software. It’s not possible you can simply walk away with a sorry. If you going to bankrupt the computer, hand in all the Intellectual property, we deserve to get everything left In the company.

Throughout last 10-12 months, I did not have high expectations of seeing this product, the updates became much less common without any substance or progress.

Lesson to be learned, investing money in a new company / startup has definite danger of potential loss of the investment. I am furious reading that tons of their money went to:

1) PR instead or R&D.

2) Trying to achieve one of the stretch goals "The addition of stretch-goals to add mobile support increased the software scope from two operating systems to five which has double the amount of work" . What did you expect?

These are high salaries to be paid, how did you even come up with the initial $100K figure and thought it would be enough to cover the cost? Even though you got $6mil from the crowdfunding, this amount proved to be insufficient.

Kickstarter projects in the range of millions should be releasing their accounts and expenditure in the future. I am extremely hesitant to back any other kickstarter project again.

With the ongoing broken commitments at least this won't waste anymore of our time and continue to be a significant negative lingering frustrating experience. It is gross mismanagement of funds and it is a shame everyone's money is gone ... it also puts severe credibility issues for backing other Kickstarter projects... which is really sad because there are a lot of good people that will deliver or refund monies for products not delivered. OSSIC hurt my daughter's belief in investing in Kickstarter projects and vendors... at least I paid on a CitiBank credit card and they refunded my money since when they contacted OSSIC after failing to deliver on promised dates over and over OSSIC told CitiBank they will not refund the money and this was LONG before they "ran out of money"... so all you others out there... if you paid on a credit card report this as fraud!!!!

I consider this borderline fraudulent. Kickstarter is also responsible for the complete lack of transparency. For Ossic to think they could just take funding and not deliver anything at all - and then have the audacity to send out a quick email before closing shop - is disgraceful.

Superbacker

This sucks but at least they aren't dragging it out with more fake updates for another year or more. Losing the money sucks but what's done is done. I stopped supporting Kickstarter stuff for this exact reason. Now more will do the same. RIP our money.

The Finance To Value Framework - By Fred Wilson - VC
There are two major failure modes in startups.

The first common failure mode is the thing you make doesn’t get adopted. That’s called not finding product market fit in startup lingo.

The second common failure mode is “getting too far out over your skis” and it happens to companies that do find product market fit but mess things up by building an inappropriate cost structure (and capital base) and it all comes crashing down on them when they either can’t continue to raise money at ever increasing valuations and/or when they can’t grow into their cost structure quickly enough.

The first failure mode comes with the territory. The world of startups is all about experimentation. Most experiments fail. If this happens to you, it sucks, but that is what you signed up for.

The second failure mode is entirely avoidable and way more common than you might think.

The capital markets are efficient over the very long run but highly inefficient in the moment. So just because investors are willing to throw gobs of money at you and your company, it doesn’t mean that it is smart to take it. And, as I have written numerous times here before, having lots of capital does not derisk your business plan. In many cases, it amplifies the risk of your business plan.

So how do you stay in balance and avoid getting too far out over your skis?

I like this framework that I call “Finance To Value” which means you finance your business to regular valuation targets that are driven by fundamental value analysis.

The first thing you need to know is how your business will be valued by a buyer or the public markets when it is a scaled business. I like to use EBITDA and Revenue multiples for this work. And the best place to get them is from bankers who work in your sector and/or investors who are active in your sector. The key point is these multiples are what you are going to be valued at upon exit or IPO, not currently.

Revenue multiples work better for this than EBITDA because very few companies have positive EBITDA during their growth phases.

Here are some examples. Please don’t use these multiples without verifying them with someone who knows your industry and your business. These are simply examples:

E-commerce business – 1 to 2 times revenues

SAAS business – 6 to 8 times revenues

Marketplace business – 4 to 6 times revenues (which can be less than 1x GMV depending on your take rate)

Once you know this number for your business (and don’t be aspirational or agressive in determining it as that will just lead to problems), you can apply the Finance To Value framework.

Joined as well https://www.facebook.com/groups/932229213618373, but I am not expecting anything. One thing that I do want to understand, for future kickstarters, is their spending overview. How can you spend this amount of money and don’t see this coming? And why has the communication always been so positive, we are all big boys and can handle sunk costs, so rather would have known the truth.

Joined the class action. This is the response I got when I asked about the delay and possible refund in Nov. 2017, which was about the time the ran out of funds:
OSSIC

November 1, 2017

Hi Paul!

Thanks for your support and patience with this delay. With 5 Kickstarters under your belt you definitely are a veteran!

Overall we're as frustrated with the delay as you are. While delays are not ideal, they are not necessary failure either as the extra time enables us to work toward delivering the best product we can without compromises or shortcuts. As an early backer, you deserve the product we promised.

While gaming is a great use-case for 3D audio, it is actually only a piece of our current backer market. Many are audio producers, sound designers, game developers, and of course audiophiles. The future of music is a huge part of our vision, which is one of the reasons the engineers at Abbey Road have been working with us.

Regarding the refund, OSSIC does not offer refunds for Kickstarter units at this time, as the funds have been pre-allocated for manufacturing and development of the units themselves. This is a large monetary investment that was allocated a month after the Kickstarter ended. If you have questions regarding your order feel free to email info@ossic.com.

Overall we really appreciate all of your support so far. Are you located in San Diego? We would love to host you in our office to get a sneak peak for yourself if you are! I really think you'll be impressed. Especially as an audio engineer!

Superbacker

Great I knew this would not work but WHERE IS MY MONY THEY TOOK. As Kickstarter they are and should be responsible to return monies invested. I WOULD LIKE A RESPONCE FROM KICKSTARTER AS TO WHEN WILL I RECEIVE MY MONEY!!!!!

The next time I read backless promises on projects, I will remember the treatment I just received from OSSIC without the courtesy of even getting a reach around. Hope you enjoyed screwing the common man out of good money so you could kick your feet up and sit on your fat asses for two years, sending the occasion email to placate your loyal backers. I would say how do you feel, but you obviously lack the soul and integrity to have any feelings for the people you have ripped off. Hope you enjoyed the money, I will just have to rely on karma to run its course.

This feels like a complete failure of management and planning. You spend all the cash developing a product you can't then afford to produce? And they're trying to suggest no company would take on the product and IP? Smells like BS.

What do you think a Class Action Law suit will cost? Do you really think that some "high roller" Attorney will help you out without billing you first for his or her expenses? Deal with the fact that whatever we want to name this Kickstarter project, we have lost big time! You may be angry for a while, but get on with your Life and re-think before you step into another shitty Kickstarter project.

This was such a foreseeable death, with all their bullshit updates, traveling all the time instead of focusing on developing the product. Pretty certain that while there was money, they also paid themselves a nice salary.

Superbacker

They asked for no more than 100.000 $ to fund this project and ship it in Jan 2017. They raised proud $ 5.932.913 ($ 2,708,472 on Kickstarter and $ 3,224,441 on Indiegogo). That is nearly 60 times the amount they've been asking for. In Feb 2018 they admitted debts in the amount of $ 3.506.254 which sums up to $ 9.439.167. Still they kept adding stuff like in update 57 where they wrote: "Our initial head-tracker component was upgraded mid-development to further reduce latency" and "Mobile support necessitated a fundamental architecture change for the OSSIC X, requiring some additional development time ". Now in May 2018 they are broke, telling us they'd need at least another 2.000.000 $ more. This is one heck of a failed management...

Can’t say I’m not disappointed, why the lies towards the end of the project. You knew you were never gonna ship in 2017
Not even sure why I’m writing this as it makes no difference to the fact we’ve all lost our money. It was a risk we all took and should all have understood
Hope you enjoyed the jollys
Not sure you’ll even be bothered ready these comments but if you have a shred of self respect then please hand over any rights you have to the intellectual property or patents to the backers

@David - there was one dev unit backer on head fi forums reporting noise issues with his cans. He mentioned 4 threads going on the closed Dev forums, so allegedly there were more units out in the open.
The ossic Twitter account retweeted two posts from people getting their Dev units, lastly we had one (or two, don't remember for sure) Dev units appear on eBay around the time they were shipped out.

The fact that this project failed is obviously disappointing but the main issue for many of us is the lack of transparency and accountability.
I still have yet to hear from even ONE developer backer who reportedly received their headphones. Surely if they were shipped, we would've heard from at least one of them.
This lack of transparency appears to be in conflict with the Kickstarter terms.
I've joined the Facebook page about further action primarily to see how things unfold and whether Ossic release a transparent report according to Kickstarter and other legally abiding terms and laws.
https://m.facebook.com/groups/932229213618373